My iron smelter array. Total capacity is 9600 iron ingots/minute, using the basic recipe. I actually only have Mk.4 belts, so I can only use the bottom four (of ten) floors… But I like building oversized.
The idea was to centralize the production of basic resources (ingots and concrete). Then, the actual factories making stuff could be located more or less anywhere, regardless of local resources. Centralizing the smelting would reduce the many-to-many distribution problem of resources to a many-to-one (resources to smelter) and a one-to-many (smelter-to-factory).
But actually integrating the train station was a pain in the ass and not really fun compared to the factory. I have lots of ideas for how I want factories to look and nowhere can I fit three or more train stations. Maybe this is more a Factorio style and Satisfactory is really more about building the factory close to the resources. So I may not actually end up using this lol.
That said, everything is blueprinted now, so I may end up using a smaller version of this design in a different factory.
The back, with observation tower for scale.
Shoutouts to the 1.1 vertical nudging feature, which should have been in the game from the start and the new curve mode for conveyors, which look great with the gentle curvature of the main structure.
Dubious shoutout to the feature/bug that vertical splitters now allow you to build X.5m long vertical conveyors, which is a power that I should have used more sparingly.
I understood half (maybe less) cuz I don’t play the game…but enough to be 🥹🥹🥹🥹😱😱😱😱
It’s a basic sort of factory system.
Around the map, there are nodes of resources like iron that you can build mining rigs on to extract those resources. Depending on the quality of the node and the tier of the miner, it affects how much ore can be extracted from the node per minute.
Satisfactory also uses a conveyor belt system to transport materials. Like miners, conveyors also have tiers which determine how fast they move and therefore how many resources per minute they can carry. There are also corresponding lifts which are used to transport materials vertically in a compact space.
Conveyors can also run through splitters or mergers, which as the name implies either split materials from one conveyor line into multiple lines to feed into multiple machines, or merge materials from several conveyor lines into a single line such as when consolidating the output product.
Smelters then receive the unprocessed iron ore and convert it to iron ingots, which is a material that is used for a variety of subsequent crafts. The only thing with smelters is that they don’t have tiers to work faster; there are ways you can overclock a smelter to produce quicker output, but the resources to do so are finite and expensive.
So, the best way to process more materials at scale is to simply create more of them. And in this situation where OP is extracting an incredibly high volume of iron, they created an incredibly large number of smelters to process it.
Part of the challenge of Satisfactory is how to create elegant systems that are clean and efficient, avoiding tangled messes of conveyor belts, bottlenecks, and deficiencies, so coming up with such a system at a scale like this is very impressive.